This morning we finished the inventory of the inside of the AASTINO, so if you're just burning to know how many M4 bolts the AASTINO holds, well you know who to come to. Jon returned to trying to fix the computer issues, I think a good whack with a sledgehammer might help but unfortunately we don't have one - you can check the list if you don't believe me. I went on with testing Nigel's software. We want the CCD
exposure time and the time between exposures to change depending on the position of the sun and the moon. For example it we took a really long exposure when the sun was in the view of the fibres we'd just end up with a saturated CCD - not handy. To test the software I had to make up a test list of sun and moon positions that the program could step through and tell me what type of exposure it had decided to take. So in
the reenactment of one day the sun was directly in the field of view of the fibres, then it jumped out, then the moon suddenly appeared in the fibres, the sun went down in a matter of seconds and then the moon jumped over to the other side of the sky - would have been an= interesting day.

Yesterday we received a care package from UNSW - unfortunately unlike most care packages this one didn't contain chocolate. However it did have a few other handy things we needed, including a new soldering iron and a bunch of tips - our current soldering iron has a tip the size of a baseball bat so we have been borrowing one from the station. We also received new Australian and American flags - we still haven't found the last American flag. We should be receiving new Italian and French flags in the next couple of days, they are currently in either Christchurch, McMurdo, Terra Nova Bay, an airplane or stuck on a pallet in the snow somewhere. There was very little wind today so I decided to put up the new Aussie and American flags. Armed with the ladder, drill and some cords which look suspiciously like the unused cords off the tent...I headed to the flag poles. Using some elaborate knot tying techniques I secured the flags, avoiding an international incident by not dropping
either of them on the ground - remember there is a webcam pointing at the flag poles.

Heading back inside I found Jon with his head stuck in the electronics rack, an oscilloscope on one side and a multi-meter in his hand. Not wanting to get involved I decided it was a good day to start sealing the AASTINO...outside. We have found melted snow dripping through the "seam" that extends along the roof of the AASTINO. Unfortunately a cable tray holding a bunch of cables runs underneath this seam and as everyone knows, melted snow and cables don't mix. I clambered on the roof - silicon tube and screwdriver in hand - to try and seal the seam. It turns out that silicon tubes freeze quite quickly in -35 degree temperature - who would have thought - so every five minutes or so I would get off the roof, swap the silicon tube with one sitting on the heaters and clamber back up again. After about the 56th millionth time I came back in I found Jon staring at the clock..."the clock's wrong". Ah yes, comparing the Dome C clock and the Sydney clock there was a 3 hour 50 minute difference instead of the customary 3 hour difference..and it was 7:30pm, time to leave for dinner. You can imagine our immense relief at discovering the clock problem at this time, another half hour and we would have missed dinner...Jon effectively just saved our lives!
- Suze